Читать книгу The Question Authority - Rachel Cline - Страница 13

Eighth grade: I’m staring out the window at the leaves on the tree outside. They are light green outlined in brown with just a tiny orange line between. The green is too bright and the orange next to it clashes. They look like the colors in one of those psychedelic posters from The Fillmore. Rasmussen is reading to us from Lady Sings the Blues, Billie Holiday’s autobiography. He’s always reading to us about black people. Being read aloud to is a big part of our curriculum here, which seems like cheating to me but I am perfectly happy to sit here looking at the tree and picturing the Baltimore row houses where Billie scrubbed people’s stoops for a nickel each, with her own brush and can of Bon Ami. Since I grew up in the city, I can always picture the lives of the people we read about. I know what a city street looks like, and what a pimp is, and now I know that the group of men drinking out of brown paper bags near the bus stop is “the corner wine club,” that the guys in white robes on the subway are disciples of the prophet Elijah Muhammad. What I can’t picture are the country clubs and pep squads in the books I get from the Scholastic book club, or what Nancy Drew’s “powder-blue roadster” looks like. Where do kids play in places where there are no vacant lots, or fire stairs, or construction sites—where the roofs are not flat enough to run around on?

I’ve bragged about Bob Rasmussen to my neighborhood friends—he’s incredibly cool and weird at the same time. He’s twenty-six, has a beard and wears cowboy boots and rides a motorcycle named “Babe the Blue Ox.” Kids hang around at his house after school and he lets us listen to his records and read his magazines and Naomi, his wife, sometimes does projects with little Doria and Archer that we can do, too. Like tie-dyeing. I don’t like little kids so I avoid that part. In fact, I avoid the whole Bob’s-house-as-hangout thing, but I brag about it anyway.

I’m watching Beth, who sits across the U of desks from me—he doesn’t let us sit together anymore because we giggle too much. She is drawing in her notebook, or writing. She’s the worst speller I’ve ever seen. Sometimes I think she’s a lot stupider than I am but not because of how she is as a friend; just some of the things she’s interested in—like fashion designers—are stupid and she doesn’t really like to read. She’s also boy-crazy. She would never try to describe the leaves out the window. She doesn’t come from an artistic family. When I showed her the star charts painted on the ceiling in my grandfather’s library, she asked why you would put something so fancy in a place where no one would really see it.

I am going to write a poem about that tree outside, and it’s also going to be about The Fillmore Auditorium and Billie Holiday singing in a whorehouse, and this crazy private school with only white girls in it reading her biography when there are race riots going on like a mile away. That’s why there are so many girls here from other neighborhoods—the public schools they were supposed to go to are too scary now.

“Okay,” Bob says, getting up from his reading posture and stretching his arms over his head so that his T-shirt goes up and shows the arrow of orange hair on his belly, which I can’t help but look at even though it’s totally repulsive. “It’s time for Rasmatazz.” While we are getting out our pencils and opening our notebooks, Beth asks, “Didn’t we just do one of these?”

“You mean just last week? Yeah. We did. We’re going to keep doing it until you get it right.” He’s smirking when he says this, of course, and everyone laughs. “Anyone remember what we’re up to?”

“Ninety seconds!” Trina Franklin announces, in a tone that sounds like, “It’s my birthday!” I knew the answer to that question, too, but would have gone through Chinese fingernail torture before letting him know I am interested in his experiment. I hated it at fifteen seconds and was in a rage at thirty.

When he says “Go,” everyone else starts writing immediately—already conditioned like sheep. If we have nothing to say, we are supposed to just write our names over and over but I have never stooped to that. I’m not worried about having nothing to say, but his assumption that he has the right to read anything that happens to be going through my head at this moment really bothers me so I spend the first ten seconds or so coming up with something that I feel is Rasmussen-proof. The first time, all I wrote was “The End,” which I thought was pretty good. This time, I’m going to go with the tree outside— no emotions or opinions, just straight description:

The leaves on the tree outside are ugly. Orange and green at the same time like the colors of a pop art poster. How does nature come up with this stuff? I hate the way people say “Mother Nature,” and picture a little old lady in a bonnet like Old Mother Hubbard. Nature is not a woman, first off, any more than boats or cars or anything else. And if it was a woman it would not be an old mother but someone more like Janis Joplin or Angela Davis. From now on, when someone says “Mother Nature,”I’m—

“Time!” He walks around to collect our papers and smiles when he sees the block of text on my page, taking credit for it in some way, which I should have anticipated but I was thinking that I was writing something that he couldn’t even have an opinion about. Ha. He can have an opinion about anything. I sneer back at him.

After the Rasmatazz, we go downstairs for lunch: chicken chow mein. It’s mostly celery, but no one minds because of the crunchy noodles they put out with it. Beth and I sit together and, after speed-eating for five minutes, she says to me, “I think he knows.”

“Knows what?”

“About my condition.” She says this sooo dramatically, as though she’s a character in a soap opera, and then she cracks up. I laugh along but not full out. I can sense she’s about to reveal something I didn’t see coming, and that is my least favorite thing on earth.

“But what?” I finally ask her. “What are you talking about?”

“Let’s do a test. Look at what I’m wearing and see if you can figure it out.”

Since when do I care what she’s wearing? For the record, it’s a white, man-tailored shirt that’s huge on her, and pink corduroy bell-bottoms. I see Beth every day and I’ve never seen the pants before but she gets a lot of new clothes so that’s not particularly weird. The pants are the kind with patch pockets on the front and back and a high waist—sailor bells—and I wish I had some like that but my wardrobe is only what I can order from Sears or find at A&S. It’s hard even finding blue jeans that fit me and I got stuck with Wranglers even though everyone else is wearing Levi’s or Lee Riders. Anyway, Beth is wearing pink pants. “New pants?”

“Well, yeah, but that’s not the point. I guess he is kind of perceptive because he got it right away.”

Now she’s openly baiting me. I scan the lunchroom, looking at what everyone else is wearing for some kind of clue.

“HINT: It feels like rocks.”

“Your period??” “It feels like rocks” is what Janie told Harriet in The Long Secret, which Beth gave me for my birthday in fifth grade and is still my second-favorite book of all time.

“A-duh!” We both laugh because of the way Beth says that phrase. She makes her upper lip stick out and crosses her eyes. But while I’m laughing a weird thought comes into my head out of nowhere: Beth’s naked body. She’s still a girl, not a woman, but with breasts and pubes and everything I don’t yet have. The thought embarrasses me.

“My mother was so funny yesterday,” I say, even though my mother is never funny. “I was playing Laura Nyro and she was trying to dance along with ‘Stoned Soul Picnic.’ She doesn’t have a single ounce of natural rhythm.”

Beth nods and continues her story. “He comes up behind me this morning and says, ‘Don’t worry, no one else can tell.’”

“Ew!”

“I know, but isn’t that kind of crazy? He deduced it that I was covering up the bulge with the long shirt, and the pink pants are in case I leak.”

“What bulge?”

“From the pad, stupid.”

“You’re wearing a sanitary napkin?”

“What else would I be wearing?”

“My mother bought me Tampax,” I say, bragging. “She put them in my bathroom so we don’t even have to discuss it when it happens.” I thought this was extremely cool of her but Beth’s face is perplexed.

“But you’re a virgin,” she says.

“And you’re not?”

“You can’t use tampons if you’re a virgin.”

“You can too . . .” As soon as the words are out of my mouth I begin to doubt myself. What do I actually know about any of this? Thankfully, she changes the subject. “Do you want to come with me to Loehmann’s next weekend?”

I’ve never been to Loehmann’s but I know what it is, more or less. I have no money to spend and no excuse for buying any new clothes but I want to go where Beth goes.

“How much money would I need?”

“How should I know? It depends on what you buy.”

“How much will you bring?”

“Sometimes you’re such a blockhead. Obviously, my mother buys my clothes for me. I have no idea. Ask your mother.”

I make an appropriate face—she remembers who my mother is.

“Okay, bring a hundred dollars.”

This would be almost funny except she doesn’t appear to be joking. I’ve never even seen a hundred dollars. That would be like five years’ worth of my allowance, and the most I’ve ever managed to save of that was enough to buy The White Album.

For dessert there is prune whip, which no one would dare eat.